Murray & Richardson's central claim is that effective organizational change is not a slow, linear process — it is a rapid, orchestrated campaign. The 100-day model creates urgency, breaks the organization's natural inertia, and generates momentum before resistance can consolidate. Slow change is often no change.
Clear, unambiguous direction from the top. People must know where they are going and why — not a vision statement, but a concrete picture of the future state and what must change to get there.
Change actions happen faster than resistance can organize. The first 100 days are critical — decisions made, structures changed, people moved. Delay = signal that change is not real.
Early wins that demonstrate change is real, not reversible, and producing results. Momentum shifts the organization from "wait and see" to "get on board before it's too late."
| Symptom | Missing Condition | What to Do |
|---|---|---|
| People don't know what the change is or why it's happening | Guidance | CEO must communicate the burning platform and destination — repeatedly and specifically |
| Change is announced but nothing structural happens for months | Speed | Make immediate, visible structural moves — appointments, departures, budget shifts |
| People are watching to see if this is "real" or another initiative that will fade | Momentum | Identify and celebrate early wins; publicly recognize early adopters; remove visible blockers |
| All three symptoms present simultaneously | Preconditions: Urgency and/or Commitment | Do not launch change until the CEO is personally ready — a half-committed change campaign is worse than no change |
N. Anand and Jean-Louis Barsoux (HBR, Nov–Dec 2017) studied 62 corporate transformations over four years. Their finding is uncomfortable: poor execution is only part of the problem. About 75% of change efforts fail — and a major but underdiagnosed cause is that organizations pursue the wrong change to begin with.
Failing to examine and align these three factors drastically reduces the odds of producing lasting change:
CEO Ron Johnson's mistake: Walked in and immediately redesigned stores and eliminated discounts to attract "younger, trendier" customers. Sales fell 25%. Stock dropped 50%.
The real problem: JCP's actual crisis was the misalignment of in-store and online operations — customers couldn't find in stores what was showcased online. That was the right quest (Nimbleness + Customer Focus). Johnson pursued the wrong quest (brand repositioning) at the wrong time.
The fix: Successor Marvin Ellison fixed the plumbing first — channel integration, app redesign, same-day pickup — then rebuilt brand relevance. From seventh-largest global retailer to third.
Every transformation is triggered by the pursuit of value. The trap is focusing too narrowly on either efficiency (cutting) or growth (investing) rather than both simultaneously.
Organizations must identify one compelling, uncontested transformation priority. "All of the above" is a recipe for failure. Five prototypical quests:
| Quest | Key Enablers | Key Blockers |
|---|---|---|
| Global Presence | Rewiring systems to leverage global capabilities; using diversity as competitive advantage | Acquiring weak businesses in haste; honouring dominant culture only; failing to integrate talent globally |
| Customer Focus | Training workforce to understand customer needs; reframing customer relations to learn rather than close deals | Entrenched culture pushing products not solutions; not coordinating front and back office for seamless delivery |
| Nimbleness | Detecting and responding to environmental changes; learning to prototype rapidly and institutionalize what works | Blind spots producing an incomplete picture; responding too slowly due to red tape; taking too long to cut losses |
| Innovation | Collaborating across full innovation spectrum; articulating innovation needs; creating win-win with partners | Entrenched product-pushing culture; continuing to depend on former intermediaries |
| Sustainability | Engaging all stakeholders; leveraging sustainability as strategic advantage; top-team commitment | Undermeasuring progress; greenwashing; failing to balance efficiency and sustainability |
Transformation journeys run out of steam when leadership development is not matched to the chosen quest. The Lenovo vs. Acer case is instructive:
Value generation and leadership development become ends in themselves — generic efforts not linked to transformation. Infosys developed an admired leadership development program but failed to tie it to transformational business needs — ultimately forced to bring in an outside CEO.
The board or CEO is led astray by a forceful vision (Ron Johnson at JCP), competitor copying, or consultant recommendations. Home Depot's Bob Nardelli pursued construction professionals — adjacent market distraction from core slumping store sales. When he resigned, the strategy immediately reversed.
Carrefour CEO Lars Olofsson (2009): launched 7 simultaneous strategic initiatives — innovation, customer engagement, agility, global expansion, and more. Result: confusion, 53% share price drop, Olofsson gone in under 2 years. His successor Georges Plassat stripped everything back to one focus: domestic core retail.
Mark Bonchek and Barry Libert (HBR, 2017) argue that the central failure of most transformation efforts is this: organizations copy business models without copying the mental models that make those business models work. The result is structural change without the thinking required to sustain it.
How leaders think about the business — who the competition is, what business they're in, what success means
What the company does — how it creates, delivers, and captures value; its structure, processes, and activities
What the organization measures as success — KPIs that must reflect the new mental and business model, not the old one
Southwest Airlines maintained 43 consecutive years of profitability and created an entirely new market category. Traditional carriers (United, American, Delta) tried to copy Southwest's business model with Continental Lite, Ted by United, and Song by Delta. All failed.
Libert's research shows companies are migrating from asset and service models toward technology and network models — which are more profitable, grow faster, and are more rewarded by markets:
| Business Model Type | Core Mental Model | What You Measure | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asset-Based | "We own things and deploy them" | Asset utilization, inventory turns, ROIC | Airlines, hotels, manufacturers |
| Service-Based | "We deliver expertise and outcomes" | Billable hours, client retention, NPS | Consulting, banking, healthcare |
| Technology-Based | "We create tools that scale" | Software release cadence, uptime, users | Tesla (vs. VW), GE's Predix platform |
| Network-Based | "We connect and orchestrate others" | Assets on platform, network density, ecosystem health | Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Shopify |
Roots Canada (TSX: ROOT) was founded in 1973 by Michael Budman and Don Green with a simple premise: comfortable, quality Canadiana. For decades the brand was synonymous with leather goods, cabin sweatpants, and an outdoor-meets-heritage aesthetic. The challenge Roots faces is not a brand problem — it's a structural retail transformation problem.
Catalyst: The pandemic-accelerated collapse of mall traffic and a brand that was generating insufficient digital revenue. Both efficiency (store rationalization) and growth (digital investment) required simultaneously.
Right Quest: Nimbleness (reconfigure business processes — build digital capability, speed up inventory response) + Customer Focus (deepen understanding of the Roots loyalist and serve them wherever they shop).
The Trap to Avoid: Being seduced by the wrong quest — doubling down on Asian store expansion (global presence) when the structural problem is channel and process agility at home. JCP's Ron Johnson equivalent would be: opening more physical locations while the digital moat widens.
Leadership Capability Alignment: Roach's mandate was to modernize operations — a Nimbleness quest requires leaders who think in terms of test-and-learn, digital KPIs, and speed. Roots needed to add those capabilities at the executive level.
Guidance: Roach's strategic priorities were clear — fix the digital gap, rationalize underperforming stores, and protect the brand's premium position. The destination was stated: "digital-first, omnichannel, premium brand." Guidance condition largely met.
Speed: Store closures executed; digital investment accelerated. But retail transformations in heritage brands carry cultural weight — speed is constrained by brand positioning risk. A Roots store closure is not just an operational decision; it's a brand signal. Speed condition: partially met with structural trade-offs.
Momentum: E-commerce growth during 2020–2021 provided early validation. The challenge is sustaining momentum through the post-pandemic normalization when digital growth rates decelerate. Early wins must translate into structural capability, not just pandemic tailwinds.
Old mental model: "We are a retailer with a heritage brand." Success = same-store sales, comparable-store growth, number of store locations. Competition = other lifestyle retailers.
Required mental model: "We are a lifestyle brand that uses retail, digital, and wholesale channels to serve loyal customers wherever they are." Success = customer lifetime value, digital revenue share, brand health metrics, repeat purchase rate.
The measurement model shift: Moving from store-level metrics to customer-level metrics. Roach has oriented Roots around DTC (direct-to-consumer) — this requires measuring how well Roots serves its customers, not how well it fills its stores.
The mandatory AI element for Roots should address a specific, high-value use case rather than generic "AI will help us":
Shopify (TSX/NYSE: SHOP) is one of the most instructive transformation stories precisely because it begins with the Bonchek & Libert insight: Tobi Lütke didn't build Shopify to be a software company. He built it because he couldn't find software good enough to run his snowboard shop. The mental model was never "SaaS vendor" — it was always "infrastructure for commerce."
The mental model shift that drove everything: Lütke reframed Shopify not as a software company (asset-based thinking) but as a network platform (network-based thinking). "We are arming the rebels" — merchants who want to compete with Amazon, not join it. This reframing determined every product decision, partnership, and investment.
Measurement model alignment: Shopify measures Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) — not just Shopify's own revenue, but the total commerce flowing through merchant stores. This is a network metric (how much value the ecosystem creates) not a software metric (how many licenses are sold). It signals the mental model: Shopify wins when its merchants win.
The Bonchek lesson: Shopify's competitors (BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Squarespace) often have similar feature sets but a different mental model — "software vendor" not "commerce infrastructure provider." That gap in mental model is why Shopify's ecosystem is orders of magnitude larger.
Shopify's quest: Unusual case — successfully pursuing both Innovation (reconfigure R&D partnerships via app ecosystem, APIs, and developer community) and Nimbleness (reconfigure business processes — rapid product release cycles, launch-test-iterate culture).
How they avoid the multi-quest trap: The two quests are fused into one coherent focus — "build the fastest, most extensible commerce platform." They're not separately managed; the same organizational capability (fast, developer-centric product teams) serves both.
The 2022 test: When pandemic tailwinds faded, Shopify laid off ~10% of the workforce. Lütke admitted publicly: "I made the wrong bet. I thought the pandemic had permanently accelerated e-commerce adoption by 5–10 years. It did not." This is a textbook Anand & Barsoux misreading of the catalyst — confusing a temporary demand surge for a permanent structural shift.
Guidance: Extraordinary. Lütke's vision — "arm the rebels," "be the infrastructure of commerce" — is one of the clearest and most consistent strategic narratives in Canadian corporate history. Every employee, product decision, and investor communication is anchored to it.
Speed: Shopify is structurally designed for speed — autonomous product teams, rapid release cycles, aggressive acquisition of capabilities (Deliverr for fulfillment, 6 River Systems for warehouse robots, Checkout blocks). Speed is a cultural norm, not a crisis response.
Momentum: The ecosystem flywheel creates compounding momentum: more merchants → more developers → better apps → more merchants. Each product launch creates visible wins for merchants, generating case studies that recruit the next wave.
Shopify is already deeply AI-embedded — the AI angle should focus on where AI creates next-stage strategic advantage, not just what they've already done:
Diagnosis precedes change: Rumelt's kernel — diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions — is the strategic content that Fast Forward's winning conditions must carry. Without a Rumelt-quality diagnosis, Guidance (Winning Condition 1) cannot be clear. The change will be fast and committed in the wrong direction.
Phase determines change readiness: A company in a Greiner Phase 4 red tape crisis needs Fast Forward's Speed urgently — the system is actively choking itself. But the management model for Phase 5 (collaborative) requires the mental model shift Bonchek & Libert describe. Greiner tells you which crisis; Fast Forward tells you how to move; Bonchek tells you what to think differently.
KPI portfolio connects to mental model: Kiron & Schrage's insight — your KPI portfolio IS your strategy — is the Bonchek & Libert measurement model in action. Changing KPIs (from store-level to customer-level for Roots; from revenue to GMV for Shopify) is the measurement model shift that signals and sustains the mental model change.
Mental model change IS culture change: Bonchek & Libert's mental model shift is exactly what culture change addresses. Session 4's readings on culture change speed and persuasion campaigns are the detailed implementation of how you change how people think — the prerequisite Bonchek & Libert identify but don't fully explain.
The quest framework recurs: Anand & Barsoux's five quests apply to every major strategic decision session. Diversification (Session 5) is often a Global Presence or Innovation quest. Acquisitions (Session 6) must be matched to a quest or they destroy value. Turnarounds (Session 7) are forced Nimbleness quests under survival pressure.
The change diagnosis framework: For your final exam company, run the full Session 3 diagnostic: What is the catalyst? Which quest is right? Does leadership have the capabilities? Is the mental model aligned to the business model? Are Fast Forward's winning conditions present? A complete answer to these questions is most of a strong final exam.
Questions apply equally to both companies. Answers integrate Fast Forward (Ch.1), Anand & Barsoux, and Bonchek & Libert. Use the framework explicitly — graders reward it.